Fox News Campaigns Against Raising The Minimum Wage

On Tuesday’s Your World, Craig Smith, Chair of Swiss America, helped trash a ballot proposal in New Jersey raising the minimum wage a dollar an hour to $8.25 an hour, with cost of living adjustments yearly. Neil Cavuto made no secret of his opinion when he asked, “Do YOU have such guarantees where YOU work?”

Smith said:

If you look at the studies, it’s pretty clear. I mean 85% of the reliable studies out there, Neil, show that every time you raise the minimum wage, you hurt employment, and you cause layoffs. I mean that’s just statistics, you can’t get away from that. And so I think if this wins, you’re going to hurt the very people that they’re trying to help.

Think about it Neil, when you talk about minimum wage, that’s really the wrong word. It’s a learning wage, that gets you in the door. Most people that start at minimum wage, two thirds of those people will get a raise within their first year. This is feel-good legislation. It’s probably great for an election time, but it’s not going to help the economy, and I guarantee you, Neil, it will cost jobs, people will be laid off, or prices will increase at the store, and we need that like a hole in the head.

Cavuto mentioned that Gov. Christie supported the wage hike and “a lot of conservatives are as well. …I guess what is troublesome in this is that automatically indexing this to inflation when that obligates employers then of all sorts, all sizes to automatically index this sort of thing to inflation even though their business might not be keeping up to inflation. It might be going just the other way.”

“And what if they can’t raise prices to keep up with that inflation?" Smith asked. He added, "This is the wrong time for this. …This is just not the right time to raise taxes or raise the minimum wage, and any economist will tell you that, Neil.”

In fact, there’s plenty of research showing that raising the minimum wage does not reduce employment, that it boosts incomes. and that leading economists say the benefits outweigh the negatives by a 4-1 margin. As Craig said, you can’t get away from that.